The start of something great

Good morning {{name!|reader}},

Welcome to the first edition of Three Great Things! If you’re reading this it likely means you’re friends or family of the three of us, so thanks for being here. And if you’re not friends or family, nice to meet you (and double thanks to whoever we know that referred you)!

The three stories today include a trade that can't hire fast enough in the year everyone's worried about work, a teenager's homemade eye test aimed at a decades-old diagnostic gap, and a pile of limestone doing what forty years of oyster shells couldn’t.

If you have any feedback or just want to say hello, feel free to reply - it’s the three of us reading.

With gratitude,

Brenner, Jordan, and Zac

Amid OpenAI and Anthropic fortune-telling the demise of entry-level employees, the job market has felt bleak for recent graduates to say the least. However, that grim narrative is far from unfolding for the newest generation of aviation mechanics. At the Pittsburgh Institute of Aeronautics (PIA), nearly half of graduates have offers in hand ahead of crossing the stage while others narrow down their choices.

Between a post-9/11 decline in airline hiring, fewer military technicians entering the workforce, and a mass exodus during COVID-19, the aviation technician shortage has reached an estimated 17,000 per Oliver Wyman. That represents a substantial gap compared to the current workforce of roughly 161,000. High demand has translated to lucrative salaries at a median wage of $79,140 in 2024 ($30,000 above the national median). Not bad for a trade program that takes under two years to complete.

Big picture: Demand for aviation mechanics is only set to grow. Its workforce is inching closer to retirement at the ripe average age of 57. Older fleets alongside new complex aircraft will require more maintenance hours. In turn, Boeing forecasts 123,000 additional technicians will be needed by 2044.

Luckily, that demand is starting to be met. Recent program graduates include everyone from pivoting film majors and Amazon warehouse workers to those who grew up dreaming of fixing planes. PIA has gone from admitting anyone with a GED to managing a waitlist as other schools nearly double their program sizes to keep up with interest. For a generation sold on a four-year degree as the only safe bet, trades mark a stable and meaningful opportunity worth noticing. And prospects are already lining up, toolbox-in-hand.

During research for a school project, 17-year-old Edward Kang came across a study using retinal images in autism diagnoses. Kang leveraged the research to develop RetinaMind, a screening test flagging autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and ADHD based on eye scans. All it took were some online tutorials and a few classes over the years for Kang to develop an AI model with an impressive 89% accuracy in differentiating ASD, ADHD, and neurotypical (a longstanding clinical problem).

For context, autism diagnosis in the US comes at an average age of 49 months and has been stuck there since 2000, while the American Academy of Pediatrics has urged screening at 18 and 24 months for the last ~20 years. To make matters worse, reliable diagnosis is possible as early as 18 months. So what's going wrong? 19 million kids with developmental concerns divided by ~800 developmental-behavioral pediatricians equals 6-12 month screening waitlists and a 2+ year average screen-to-diagnosis timeline.

Meanwhile, a cancer diagnosis can take place in days. Kids who start intervention at 18 months show markedly better developmental gains than kids who start just 9 months later. Which is what makes Kang's work so important. And it's getting recognized: RetinaMind earned him second place and $175,000 in the prestigious Regeneron Science Talent Search.

Stepping back: Paul Lipkin, a neurodevelopmental pediatrician and Johns Hopkins pediatrics professor, notes that ASD and ADHD are "behavioral phenotypes" without biomarkers. In layman's terms, since ASD and ADHD are often associated with other brain development and behavioral issues, retinal diagnostics may not be differentiating these conditions specifically. Kang agrees the technology is more of a "proof of concept" for now.

However, it's promising research on a real problem, and it’s not the only effort breaking through. Others include an FDA-authorized AI aiding autism diagnosis (Cognoa's Canvas Dx). For now, RetinaMind is one more push against a multi-decade wall, but in this case the push is led by a teenager who taught himself to code.

Why do sixty boat captains in Cedar Key, Florida gather at 8am on a scorching summer day to dump thousands of pounds of limestone into the gulf, you might ask (or might not since you likely have no idea that’s happening). Answer: to restore the reefs. And no, not the colorful coral reefs you’re likely imagining. These are oyster reefs – murky, lumpy piles of broken oyster shells that serve as a habitat for oysters to accumulate and grow.

A quick history: As harvesters collect oysters, broken shells are spread back onto the reefs, aka “cultching.” After being formalized in an 1881 statute, the practice has been used to keep a stable oyster population throughout the gulf. That is, until the 1980s, when reefs started declining faster than cultching could repopulate them, a slide that accelerated over the last 20 years when cultching stopped working altogether. To date, the reefs at Cedar Key and neighboring gulf estuaries (area where a river meets the sea) have lost 60-65% of their original size.

These reefs aren’t just relevant for those of you who like to slurp down the occasional oyster at happy hour – they also filter coastal water, anchor sediment, and feed and shelter birds. While the jury was out (and still is) on what drove the initial population decline, in 2018, a UF team led by ecologist Bill Pine uncovered the root of why cultching couldn’t grow reefs back.

A quick biology lesson too: Adult oysters release larvae: tiny, free-swimmers that drift around the water until they can find a hard surface to permanently land on and grow into full oysters. That landing spot is typically an old oyster shell, the basis for the reef. Pine’s team found that loose shells dissolved before oysters could colonize them and that the rebuilt reefs sat too low in the tide zone to survive.

They rebuilt three miles of reef at Lone Cabbage and saw oyster density triple over the following five years. After a long permitting process, their method is being scaled: a $1.9 million grant (funded by BP oil spill settlement money) is paying for Cedar Key’s oystermen to go back out in the offseason and lay limestone this summer.

The reality: The effort of Pine’s team has only replaced an estimated 3% of lost reef. But forty years in, the momentum is finally reversing, and now that oysters have a hard surface to land on, the reef can start rebuilding itself.